Wilfred Owen was born near Oswestry, Shropshire, where his father worked on the railway. He was educated at the Birkenhead Institute, Liverpool and Shrewsbury Technical College. He worked as a pupil-teacher in a poor country parish before a shortage of money forced him to drop his hopes of studying at the University of London and take up a teaching post in Bordeaux (1913). He was tutoring in the Pyrenees when war was declared and enlisted as shortly afterwards.

In 1917 he suffered severe concussion and 'trench-fever' whilst fighting on the Somme and spent a period recuperating at Craiglockart War Hospital, near Edinburgh. It was he that he met Siegfried Sassoon who read his poems,... more »

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Comments about Wilfred Owen

Themes of wilfred Owen War Poems.
Pity Of Wars- Owen poems convey his genuine feelings for soldiers as they are caught up in the pity of war. Here are soldiers experience extreme destructivness; destruction of civilisation, destruction of the landscape, and very importantly, the destructive effect war can have on the human soul, this is particularly evident through poems such as strange meeting, Owen does not portray anger as the enemy he is angry at the people who are sending them to war, who are affectively his superior and his rulers of the country, he is angry at the people who are sending him to war because of the lost of lives.

Wilfred Owen suffered first hand the horrors of war. In fact he himself also was a victim of shell shock or neurasthenia, a condition provoked by the traumas witnessed on the battlefield. It is therefore quite understandable that his poetry reflect those emotions and those horrors. a very good example of this is Dulce et decorum est, perhaps his most famous poem which provides a lot of graphic detail and gruesome images that however horrible they might be only tell the truth about war unlike what some other poets of the time say Pope said about war. Perhaps because they did not themselves experience those horrors or maybe they just preferred to look at it from a more romantic angle. This however does not leave out the fact that what Owen set out to do through his poetry was bring awareness about the true aspects of war and its consequences. This can be clearly seen in The Dead-beat, Anthem for Doomed Youth and Mental Cases all of which portray the devastation, both mental and physical, provoked by war.

Unfortunately, this is not a very representative collection of his works. He wrote some excellent, more light-hearted poetry, as well as the very emotive war poems, and to round off your knowledge of this wonderful poet, I would advise going to the bookshop and purchasing an anthology of his work. A couple of decades ago, there was an excellent book entitled 'Up the Line to Death', which concentrated primarily on the war poems of men such as Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Brooke - but also included a fair share of their other work. See if you can find something similar, and enjoy 'Shadwell Stair', for example.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs,And towards our distant rest began to trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hootsOf gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! - An ecstasy of fumblingFitting the clumsy helmets just in time,But someone still was yelling out and stumblingAnd flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.- ...